Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(11)

Frangie wipes her hands, checks the chicken wire to make sure her charges are safe, and sets off toward Greenwood Street. There half a dozen two-story brick buildings have replaced a segment of what was destroyed in the riot but which give way on all sides to vacant lots, fire-scarred derelicts, low bungalows, and intermittent sections of storefronts featuring a malt shop, pawn shops, dress shops, drinking establishments, a pool hall, and a church.

It’s always busy out on Thursday nights when maids who work for the rich white folk get their traditional night off. Busier even than usual with this muggy weather that threatens tornadoes. Frangie wears a faded-green floral-print sundress and walks barefoot. The riot and the Depression both linger on in Tulsa, especially in Greenwood. Frangie owns a pair of shoes, but they’re a size too small and reserved for church, school, and bad weather. She figures she will put on her shoes when she goes to enlist, and the army will give her a good pair of boots. They’ll probably take getting used to, the boots, after so long running around barefoot or else wearing her size-too-small hand-me-down pumps.

Frangie lets herself be drawn like a fly to honey by the music throbbing from the Regent’s Club, a ramshackle affair built of wood siding and nailed-on sheets of tin. The street is dark at 9:00 p.m., but lively with maids and washerwomen, gardeners and butlers, all dressed to the limit of their pocketbooks.

“Hey, pretty girl.” This from a man in a zoot suit with its draping, high-belted trousers and absurdly long, padded-shoulder jacket.

“You’re too old for me, Grandpa,” Frangie says breezily.

The man laughs and mimes a knife going into his heart. “Oh, little sister, why you want to hurt a man like that?”

Frangie walks on by, pleased with herself. She slows her pace as she passes the club. There’s a clarinet playing now; a wild, thrilling sound backed by what some people called “jungle” rhythms.

Frangie sings softly to herself, mimicking the instruments. “Bada da da, dada dada . . . bum bum bumbum bum bumbum bum badum bum.” Cool clarinet now, and drums and stand-up bass, all urgent and relentless.

Frangie would love to go inside, but that costs a dime except on Ladies’ Nights, and Frangie does not have a dime. But there’s no law against lurking on the street outside, swaying to the music, feeling it speak to something inside her.

Devil jazz. It seems to Frangie that devils have good taste in music.

“Frangie? Is that you?”

The voice belongs to an old schoolmate of hers, Doon Acey. He was a year ahead of her, but unlike many upper classmen he’d always been decent enough to her.

He moved away, she thought, up to Memphis; anyway she hasn’t seen him around lately. And she’s certainly never seen him like this: he’s wearing an Army Class A uniform, dark green, with a single yellow chevron on his shoulder and a rakishly tilted cap on his head.

“Doon? Well, look at you.”

Doon grins with far more confidence than he’d ever shown when she knew him as one of the less conceited athletes at school.

“You like the monkey suit?” Doon asks. He points at the stripe. “Private first class. But you can just call me PFC Acey.”

“Looks like I’ll have one for myself soon,” Frangie says. “A uniform, anyway, maybe not such a fine stripe.”

The grin drops from Doon’s face. “You got drafted? But you’re not even eighteen yet, are you?”

Frangie shrugs, feeling a little strange talking about her decision. “I’ll be eighteen soon enough, and I’m not waiting around for some draft board. I’m enlisting.”

“Enlisting?” Doon looks at her as if she might be crazy. “Why would you do a foolish thing like that?” He takes her arm and guides her a few yards away to where the crowd is less thick and the music not so urgent. “Frangie, I don’t know what you think is going on in this war, but it’s not what folks think it is, at least not for us.”

The laugh-a-minute Doon is gone suddenly, replaced by an earnest young man. Frangie is almost alarmed by the change.

“So tell me,” Frangie says.

“First of all, nothing changes between black and white. We have white officers—only white officers, no Negro officers. Most of the NCOs are colored, but it doesn’t help because we’re still doing the same old shit—sorry, I shouldn’t use that word. The same old stuff. I’m in the artillery.” He points to a small badge on his collar, two ancient cannons, crossed. “See those cannons? That’s just about how old our equipment is. The white regiments get the new stuff; we get what’s too old or broken . . . I mean, don’t start thinking things are different for us just because we’re fighting for the same country.”

“My pop’s too hurt to work.”

“I heard about that.”

“And we need the money.”

Doon nods, accepting that, but he is still concerned. Frangie figures it’s not the first time he’s heard a similar story. “My mama talks about me going to college but can’t pay the grocer.”

“College girl, huh?” Doon brings back that wide smile of his, and she likes him for that. Too many people still didn’t believe females belong in college, let alone colored ones. “What would you study, little Frangie, if you were to go to college?”

“I guess I wouldn’t mind being a doctor,” Frangie says shyly.